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The Early Yeats and the Pattern of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas R. Whitaker
Thomas R. Whitaker*
Affiliation:
Oberlin College, Ohio
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Extract

In 1926, coming upon Spengler's Decline of the West, Yeats was amazed and delighted. “Here is a very strange thing,” he wrote to Sturge Moore, “which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual man not being shut up in a bottle.” While he had been drawing his diagrams for the historical sketch in A Vision, Spengler's first edition had been going through the press. Had there been some occult communication? “I can almost say… that there is no difference in our interpretation of history (an interpretation that had never occurred to anybody before) that is not accounted for by his great and my slight erudition.” Though Yeats exaggerated, the similarities are substantial; but the means of communication are more various than he wished to allow. Many of Spengler's views were far from novel; and Yeats's early acquaintance with philosophies of history was much broader than his disclaimers of erudition imply. In fact, by 1895 his own historical symbolism was taking clear form; and like Spengler's system, it was amply nourished by the common thought of nineteenth-century Europe.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , June 1960 , pp. 320 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 W. B. Yeats and T. Slurge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–37, ed. Ursula Bridge (London, 1953), pp. 104–105. For other disclaimers see A Vision (London, 1925), pp. xi–xii; Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin, 1944), p. 3; and A Vision (London, 1937), p. 261. W. Y. Tindall, in “Transcendentalism in Contemporary Literature,” The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur E. Christy (New York, 1945), p. 182, and Richard Ellmann, in Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York, 1948), p. 68, first stressed theosophical bases for Yeats's vision of history. Northrop Frye, “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, xvii (Oct. 1947), 1–17, is very suggestive on the 19th-century background of Yeats's thought; and Hazard Adams, Blake and Yeats: The Contrary Vision (Ithaca, 1955), further develops the relation to Blake—largely from Blake's point of view.

2 Mosada (Dublin, 1886), p. 7.

3 Wheels and Butterflies (New York, 1935), pp. 92, 122.

4 Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 (New York, 1943), p. 393.

5 Wheels and Butterflies, p. 92 (cf. “Initiation upon a Mountain,” Criterion, xin [July, 1934], 537: “I know nothing but the novels of Balzac, and the aphorisms of Patanjali….”); Honore de Balzac, The Edition Definitive of the Comedie Humaine, trans. G. B. Ives and others (Philadelphia: Barrie, [c. 1895–1900]), XLI, 69–70. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in parentheses following citations in the text.

6 Wheels and Butterflies, p. 92; The Wanderings of Oisin (London, 1889), p. 32.

7 Wheels and Butterflies, p. 91; The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1953), p. 75.

8 “Initiation upon a Mountain,” Criterion, xm, 552.

9 “Fergus and the Druid,” Poems (London, 1895), p. 201, and The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1956), p. 33.

10 Wanderings of Oisin, p. 32.

11 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1953), p. 189.

12 See Autobiography, pp. 29, 53, and Yeats, “Louis Lambert,” London Mercury, xxx (July 1934), 231.

13 A. P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (Boston, 1888), pp. 246–247, 126–127 (for Yeats's reading of this, see Ellmann, Man and Masks, p. 61); Wheels and Butterflies, p. 92; A Vision (1925), p. xi.

14 Edouard Schuré, From Sphinx to Christ, trans. Eva Martin (London, n.d.), pp. 34–35. Cf. Yeats's hermetic order title, “Demon Est Deus Inversus,” (Ellmann, Man and Masks, p. 96) as expounded by H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (London, 1893), I, 411–424; ii, 235.

15 A Vision (1937), p. 72; E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake (London, 1893), I, 242. (This work is referred to hereafter as E&Y.)

16 E&Y, i, 272, 270–271.

17 The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 771 (this work is referred to hereafter as K); E&Y, ii, 171; K, p. 818; Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin, 1939), p. 26. For a less Blakean, more Kabbalistic, reading of the “Dream under the Hill,” stressing the attractiveness of the contemplative state for the early Yeats, see the comment of 1906 in Essays (New York, 1924), pp. 355–356.

18 Wanderings of Oisin, p. 42; for “iron” see E&Y, i, chart opposite p. 280; for the Fomorians see Poems (1895), p. 286.

19 E&Y, i, 374, 271, 272.

20 K, p. 293; Wanderings of Oisin, p. 48.

21 “Thoughts on Lady Gregory's Translations,” in The Cutting of an Agate (New York, 1912), pp. 26–27; see A Vision (1937), pp. 262–263, for a discussion of that alternation in Blakean terms.

22 Wanderings of Oisin, p. 33; Poems (1895), p. 38. See E&Y, i, 290, 300–302, and Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, i, 386 ff.

23 Poems (1895), p. 286, and note of 1912 retained in Collected Poems, p. 457. See “Teigue mac Cein's Adventure,” in Silva Gadelica, ed. Standish Hayes O'Grady (London, 1892), n, 391–392, a passage noted by Russell K. Alspach, “Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin,” PMLA, Lviii (Sept. 1943), 855.

24 E&Y, ii, 75–76.

25 Michael Maier, “A Subtle Allegory concerning the Secrets of Alchemy,” in The Hermetic Museum, ed. A. E. Waite (London, 1893), n, 199–233. Yeats drew upon The Hermetic Museum for “Rosa Alchemica,” as Thomas Dume has suggested in his unpubl. diss. (Temple Univ., 1950), “W. B. Yeats: A Study of his Reading.”

26 “The Tables of the Law,” Savoy, No. 7 (Nov. 1896), 84. Dume, op. cit., has noted the source in The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Jean P. Richter (London, 1883), ii, 291:

Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning to the first state of chaos is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new springtime, each new summer, each new month and new year—deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming—does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.

27 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955), p. 720; Yeats and Moore: Their Correspondence, p. 154.

28 Autobiography, p. 116.

29 Poems (1895), p. 33 (cf. Wanderings of Oisin, p. 27); Heinrich Heine, Pictures of Travel, trans. Charles Leland (Philadelphia & London, 1863), p. 379. Yeats echoed Heine on various occasions; for his specific references to him (from 1888 to 1935) see Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), p. 166; Essays, p. 437; The King of the Great Clock Tower (New York, 1935), p. 21.

30 Heine, Pictures of Travel, p. 312.

31 Walter Pater, Studies in the Renaissance (London, 1910), pp. 56, 57; The Secret Rose (London, 1897), p. 215; “Mr. Lionel Johnson's Poems,” Bookman, xiii (Feb. 1898), 155; Autobiography, p. 189; Yeats explicitly accepted the historical vision of the “Grande Chartreuse” in 1890, Letters to the New Island, p. 213.

32 Describing a time apparently after 1890 and before 1894, Yeats said of Ibsen: “I bought his collected works in Mr. Archer's translation… and carried them to and fro upon my journeys to Ireland and Sligo.” (Autobiography, p. 167.) He probably referred to Ibsen's Prose Dramas, ed. William Archer (New York & London, 1890).

33 Essays, pp. 374, 229.

34 The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, ed. William Archer (New York, 1911), v, 114, 374.

35 Ibid., v, xvi. George Sand had the help of the Saint-Simonian P. Leroux: see Viconte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, George Sand: Etude Bibliographique sur ses ceuwes (Paris, 1914), p. 17. Ibsen's “empires” may derive from Joachim by way of Lessing: see Otto Heller, Eenrih Ibsen (Boston & New York, 1912), pp. 100–101. Spengler mentions both Lessing and Ibsen as Joachists: The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (London, 1926–28), I, 20.

36 Wanderings of Oisin, p. 45.

37 Goethe, Samtliche Werke (Stuttgart & Berlin, 1902–07), v, 247–248. In Saint-Simonian theory an “organic” and a “critical” epoch together form a complete period. Two such periods, that of pagan polytheism and that of Catholic Christianity, have already occurred; a third is about to begin. See Hill Shine, Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians (Baltimore, 1941), pp. 30–49.

38 Sartor Resartus, ed. C. F. Harrold (New York, 1937), p. 112; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1898), m, 15–16; Lectures on the History of Literature, ed. R. P. Karkaria (London, 1892), pp. 31–32; The French Revolution (London, 1898), I, 10; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, iv, 180–181, and iii, 104–105; Lectures on the History of Litera ture, p. 185.

39 Autobiography, p. 130. In On the Boiler, when allowing himself an angry rhetoric like that of Carlyle, Yeats alluded to our civilization's approaching “the phoenix nest” (p. 25).

40 Letters to the New Island, pp. 109–111; Yeats, intro. to Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men (London, 1904), pp. xvi–xvii.

41 On the Boiler, p. 14; Margaret Grennan, William Morris: Medievalist and Revolutionary (New York, 1945), pp. 53 ff.

42 Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 227, 228, xiv; Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (Boston, [192–]), x, 195.

43 Letters to the New Island, p. 100; Carpenter, Civilisation—Its Cause and Cure (London, 1889), pp. 31 ff.

44 Yeats, “Dublin Mystics,” Bookman, viii (May 1895), 49; for Eglinton's later reservations see Some Essays and Passages by John Eglinton, sel. by Yeats (Dublin, 1905), sig. A-8“.

45 Eglinton (Wm. Magee), Two Essays on the Remnant (Dublin, 1894), p. 14; Autobiography, pp. 121, 118.

46 Allan Wade—A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats (London, 1951), p. 299—has identified an unsigned review of LeGallienne's edition of Hallam (“A Bundle of Poets,” The Speaker, 22 July 1893) as written by Yeats; Essays, p. 431; “Mr. Lionel Johnson's Poems,” Bookman, xiii, 155.

47 The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), pp. 189, 190. Cf. Essays, pp. 134–135.

48 Autobiography, p. 116; Hallam, Writings, p. 190 (cf. Autobiography, pp. 187–189).

49 Hallam, Writings, p. 190; The Secret Rose, pp. 63–64.

50 Essays, p. 463; The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston & New York, 1903–04), rv, 46–47. The early Yeats (who, like George Russell, may have read much Emerson as well as Thoreau and Whitman) could allude without condescension to Emerson's thought—Essays, p. 458; Plays and Controversies (London, 1923), p. 87—and his notation in 1886, “Talent perceives differences, Genius Unity” (see Eilmann, The Identity of Yeats [New York, 1954], p. 7) parallels an Emersonian distinction in the essays on “Plato” and “History” (Complete Works, rv, 51; ii, 13 ff.). The latter essay offers many Vichian ideas perhaps derived from Cousin.

51 Emerson, Complete Works, iv, 52 ff.; Pater, Greek Studies (London, 1910), pp. 35, 252–253; for Yeats, Sophocles and Aeschylus are both “Phidian men”: A Vision (1937), p. 269; Pater, Plato and Plalonism (London, 1910), p. 24 (cf. A Vision [1937], p. 270). As Ruth C. Child has noted—Hie Aesthetic of Walter Pater (New York, 1940), p. 89n—Pater drew upon Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (which later influenced Yeats directly as well as Spengler); but Nietzsche learned much from Emerson—see H. Hummel, “Emerson and Nietzsche,” New England Quarterly, xix (Mar. 1946), 63–84.

52 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism, p. 120; Lucy M. Garnett, Greek Folk Poesy, with essays by J. S. Stuart-Glennie (Guildford, 1896), pp. xxvi, 433; for Yeats's review of this, see “Greek Folk Poetry,” Bookman, xi (Oct. 1896), 16–17.

53 Essays, pp. 503–504; Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, ed. John J. Coss (New York, 1924), p. 115.